Richmond,VA., June 15, 1862
Dear Mother:
I hope you are not uneasy about me because I have not written before. I knew if I wrote it would take a week for you to get it, so I put if off till I could send it by Mr. Albert Farmer, who will go tomorrow. The Surgeon of the hospital has given me a passport to stay wherever I please in the city and report to him every week. I believe I should go crazy if I had to stay out in the hospital where everything is so dull and disheartening. In fact I don’t believe I am the same being I was two weeks ago, at least I don’t think as I used to and things don’t seem as they did. I don’t believe I will ever get over the death of George. The more I think of him the more it affects me, and unless I am in some battle and excitement I am eternally thinking of the last moments of his life. How he must have suffered, if he was conscious of it. I shall never forget it. I think a long letter from some of you would make me feel so much better. I shall send by Mr. Farmer my watch, sleeve buttons, also the shirt I wore off. Everything I ought to have left at home I brought away and a great many things I ought to have brought I left behind. I only brought one flannel shirt, and by the way I’ll send this one back and try this summer without them, as they are very heavy for summer wear. The war news you read every day in the papers, but Capt. Billy Brown came down from Gordonville with some ofJackson’s prisoners. He says he was in Lynchburg. Twenty-two hundred were sent in and that thirteen hundred were on the way.
The Yankees that are near Richmond, we don’t hear anything of, everything is quiet. Please some of you write me soon.
Your loving son,
Walter
Source: Joel Craig and Sharlene Baker, eds., As You May Never See Us Again: The Civil War Letters of George and Walter Battle, 4th NorthCarolina Infantry (Wake Forest,NC: The Scuppernong Press, 2010). See also Laura Elizabeth Lee, Forget-Me-Nots of the Civil War: A Romance Containing Reminiscences and Original Letters of Two Confederate Soldiers (St. Louis, Missouri: A.R. Fleming Printing Co, 1909).
